If my Blackberry runs low in the data center I can just plug into any exposed USB port on a powered up server. . A Dell waiting at the BIOS screen or a SUN in full production.
Would you mind plugging my BlackBerry into one of your production servers please?;)
So if you're an affiliate don't do business with Amazon if you don't like it. I'm not saying I think what Amazon did was a good thing but they have the right and they're making a strong point. You also have the right to not do business with them because you don't like how they do business. They vote with their feet you can vote with yours. I actually like to see this kind of thing not because I think Amazon should or shouldn't pay tax but because this is how the market is supposed to solve things.
Um how so? I hate the outcome but show me a lack of due process due process. Again, I may think the outcome was wrong but again they had a trial with the ability to ask for a mistrial for bias and with the ability to appeal when that failed. I think the decision was biased and bad but I can't really argue that there wasn't/isn't due process.
Cut and paste picture, one from a kid's face and one from an adult's privates?
Two ajacent pictures side by side?
Two pictures in the same photo album?
Two pictures in different albums on the same bookshelf?
Two pictures in different parts of the same house?
Two pictures in different parts of the same planet?
There needs to be a safe harbor line somewhere.
I wouldn't try any of these in Tennessee. This guy is probably worthless trash and maybe a borderline (or maybe not so borderline) predator and doing something like this is disturbing and immoral. That said it is extremely frightening that this kind of thing is legally equivalent to exploiting children in child porn. If I call someone stupid, hurt their feelings and incite a suicide is that some day going to be equivalent to murder? It's extremely scary to me when we try to legislate morality and ethics beyond the protection of basic natural rights.
Because a developer can't be sure you're in a secure environment when coding the app and he doesn't want to be held responsible for problems caused by your inattention or laziness especially when he expects you to be a danger to yourself. Assuming the royal "you" as in a user.
And my little libertarian heart has a problem with the concept of you determining what is appropriate in public beyond keeping me from infringing on the natural rights of others. I believe this is pretty much where we disagree.
Your sig reads "Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master." I would say "Beware of he who would direct your thoughts and actions, for in his heart he dreams himself your master".
A little personal philosophy to explain my view. I believe the individual and his free will is the highest good. Some restriction of that individual's free will is a necessary evil so that he doesn't restrict the free will of others. That said, all restriction is by definition (granted it's my definition) evil and so the best you can do to maximize the free will of the most people which I believe to be the most moral path.
Hence I think all government and all restriction is by definition an evil (though sometimes necessary to combat a greater quantity of evil). The best government is the least evil one or more accurately the one that maximizes the amount of choice and freewill amongst its citizens. Needless to say despite the fact that I choose to wear seatbelts I still have an issue with forcing everyone to do it, given my personal philosophical choices.
Actually I wear mine 100% of the time because I like living. What I'm saying is that I shouldn't be forced to protect my own life because it might cost someone something. In my opinion it violates the basic concepts of individual free will being more important than the financial health of the collective.
You can probably blame insurance companies for this one. Or whoever has to clean up after an accident.
No probably to it...you can blame insurance companies and lawyers who sue everyone in sight (note I'm not referring to all lawyers). Seat belt laws are about financial risk management nothing more. Just one more example of why the state must protect us from ourselves. Our founding fathers really should have writting "Life, LIberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness as long as the money of the powerful isn't affected.
I agree with everything you said except that DRM can be implemented correctly. The fact that people keep linking you to Pirate Bay is a perfect example of why DRM is so silly. It doesn't stop the pirates and it cripples the legit users.
I'm currently furious about my Kindle download limits (something not advertised and something you can't find out prior to purchasing a book). I totally want to support the content creators but when they treat me like a criminal not only do I not want to support them I don't even want to read their book so I don't bother pirating it. The truly insidious thing about the Kindle problem is they wont' tell you if there is a limit, you just discover it after you buy and try to transfer it to your iPhone or your new Kindle. That to me seems like fraud. I'm sure it isn't legally fraud since Amazon and the publishers can afford lobbyists and I can't but if I were to do something like this to my neighbor it would definitely be considered nasty.
DRM has got to go away, all it does is hurt the guy who wants to buy your product. The pirates just crack it and move on and when your product is badly crippled I can't blame them, they're actually fixing the flawed product you sold them at that point. Companies that use DRM encourage this sort of behavior and it will probably take some of them going out of business and that collapse being linked directly to DRM before it will change.
The download restrictions are very real and IMO near criminal since the device wasn't sold to me as a single download device. In fact it was sold as "amazon will keep copies so you can always access books you own" so imagine my surprise...
I have a book that I bought and downloaded to my Kindle and moved back and forth to the archive storage at amazon then back to the Kindle (due to problems with the original download..I mention this to be complete but I have no idea if this affected the DRM). I then attempted to access it on my iPhone while waiting at the doctor's office to pass the time and was informed that I had exceeded the download limit and if I wanted to continue to read it I would have to purchase it again. Additionally for this book Text-to-Speech is disabled which is a feature I use when I work out.
The book in question is House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street by William D Cohen. It is published by Doubleday. I won't be buying any more of Mr. Cohen's books or those published by Doubleday unless I can confirm that these limits do not exist on future purchases. Additionally despite the fact that the the Kindle is my single favorite gadget I own, this single incident kept me from purchasing the DX (which I wanted for PDF support) due to the fact I knew that the idiotic DRM policies of various publishers would make it impossible for me to seamlessly transfer texts between the two devices and the whole point of owning a Kindle for me is to travel light. Fix it Amazon or you will lose at least one customer.
"We HAVE to support DRM-content only so that we can ensure the quality of the detoxification and protein synthesis functions of iLiver. If you could just put anything in it people would complain about iLiver and it would make us look bad so we must control both the Organware and the Consumptionware for our user's own good."
It isn't really all that surprising that an author who was educated in and made his life writing has nostalgic feelings about a place that was instrumental in his life. The fact that he hates the internet is no more surprising and is likely just part of a generational gap. People/Companies who master one system will always resist the next one, especially when the next one does not improve on the old one for the niche part they have mastered. This is just an old master shaking his cane at the young upstarts and being upset that they don't respect what he accomplished and more to the point how he accomplished it and one day the large majority of us will being doing the same thing. Just because you're visionary one day doesn't mean that most don't become the inertial force against the new visionaries the next. It is the rare person that can adapt and shift and remain visionary through more than a few changes.
Leave it to/. to make a big deal out of a marketing campaign. It might as well have read, "In other news, the notoriously evil and universally hated company, Microsoft, is now running commercials trying to convince people to buy their products".
There is a common misconception of the programmer as a commodity. Designers are by far the most important resource just as architects and designers are the most important for enterprise apps. That said crappy programmers can destroy a good design just like a bad design can't be coded around. It's akin to designing a sky scraper and getting a bunch of 15th century hut builders to construct it. Designers are imperative but capable programmers are very important as well. The real question is when do you hit a point of diminishing returns for a more expert programmer. To continue the building metaphor you don't need skyscraper builders to build a hut but you'd better not try to build a skyscraper with hut builders.
LOL, I agree that was the point...previous MacOS versions were bad so the new one was considered better, while WinXP to Vista was considered worse.
BTW, I'm not thrilled with OS X...for example file management user tools on the Mac are horrid. There is a reason you see FTFF (Fix the...um...Friendly Finder) on Mac forums.
Not really my point. My point was that you won't see a switch from Flash to something more standard until the tools are easier that Flash and allow for the same level of design freedom. I just don't like bad designs so I couldn't help but rant on it a bit.
Now to your point about design still sucking. While I take your point and bad design is still bad design your tools influence your design and Flash unfortunately encourages poor usability and breaks basic browser functions due to its embedded nature. Additionally since it focuses entirely on the visual design it often is used by people who know every little about usability and technical design. Additionally it has historically limited integration options and been a pain in the rear for developers attempting to interact with it and a middle tier. So at the most general level you're correct bad design can't be fixed by tool choice but tool choice does influence design and a bad tool can screw up a good design by imposing limitations.
I once heard it called "Flashturbation" and it is completely true. Flash is a plague. Unfortunately it's a plague that is spread because the creative types learned to use Flash early on. Until the creatives are given a tool that is easier or more powerful to use than Flash you'll have to put up with bad interfaces created by people who only care about forcing an experience on the user. The interesting thing to me is that Flash authors have become like the developers of old, completely uninterested in usability because they can't see past their own concerns (technical for devs and visual for creatives).
First, I can't say I agree that Vista isn't worse than XP, I have a macbook pro running 10.5.7, a vista box, and an XP laptop (also I run XP and Ubuntu in a VM on my mac). I use my machines for music recording, fiction writing, and development (both web and otherwise) in Java,.NET, and occasionally other languages. Vista is my least favorite and I keep it around mainly for testing purposes and some media stuff that I"m too lazy to figure out how to do in Linux. It's all pretty subjective but I find it easier to tune XP and get rid of out of the box bloat.
Second, I may not be the typical user but of the windows versions I use regularly, I do like XP better than Vista. That doesn't mean it's objectively better but it does mean that I'm likely to tell people it's better and people who identify with me (tech people who develop and do some creative work on the side) are likely to listen. Additionally your friend identifies with her friends even though they're not "moderate" users and when they tell her they've had issues she will believe them. She's probably right to do so if she's like them and they have problems she'll likely have problems so it makes sense for her to listen to them instead of you despite you having more expertise.
While everyone does hate on MS around here there is one major difference. In general when Apple went to OS X (and with most subsequent upgrades) it was generally viewed as a better system but when MS went to Vista it was viewed as worse. I'm not saying you don't have a point about people hating on MS just to hate but the comparison is a bit apples and oranges.
Just to be clear (I don't want folks to think I'm anti-code review) code reviews do serve an important purpose regarding style consistency, and supportability, they just don't do much good for bug fixing...or at least they are a poor tool for it.
They can also be effective in finding best-practice issues around NFRs such as performance if your shop lacks a disciplined NFR testing approach as many do, though I'd argue that there are better tools and processes for this too and your shop would benefit more from investing in them.
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If my Blackberry runs low in the data center I can just plug into any exposed USB port on a powered up server. . A Dell waiting at the BIOS screen or a SUN in full production.
Would you mind plugging my BlackBerry into one of your production servers please? ;)
So if you're an affiliate don't do business with Amazon if you don't like it. I'm not saying I think what Amazon did was a good thing but they have the right and they're making a strong point. You also have the right to not do business with them because you don't like how they do business. They vote with their feet you can vote with yours. I actually like to see this kind of thing not because I think Amazon should or shouldn't pay tax but because this is how the market is supposed to solve things.
Um how so? I hate the outcome but show me a lack of due process due process. Again, I may think the outcome was wrong but again they had a trial with the ability to ask for a mistrial for bias and with the ability to appeal when that failed. I think the decision was biased and bad but I can't really argue that there wasn't/isn't due process.
Are these legal:
Cut and paste picture, one from a kid's face and one from an adult's privates? Two ajacent pictures side by side? Two pictures in the same photo album? Two pictures in different albums on the same bookshelf? Two pictures in different parts of the same house? Two pictures in different parts of the same planet?
There needs to be a safe harbor line somewhere.
I wouldn't try any of these in Tennessee. This guy is probably worthless trash and maybe a borderline (or maybe not so borderline) predator and doing something like this is disturbing and immoral. That said it is extremely frightening that this kind of thing is legally equivalent to exploiting children in child porn. If I call someone stupid, hurt their feelings and incite a suicide is that some day going to be equivalent to murder? It's extremely scary to me when we try to legislate morality and ethics beyond the protection of basic natural rights.
Because a developer can't be sure you're in a secure environment when coding the app and he doesn't want to be held responsible for problems caused by your inattention or laziness especially when he expects you to be a danger to yourself. Assuming the royal "you" as in a user.
And my little libertarian heart has a problem with the concept of you determining what is appropriate in public beyond keeping me from infringing on the natural rights of others. I believe this is pretty much where we disagree.
Your sig reads "Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master." I would say "Beware of he who would direct your thoughts and actions, for in his heart he dreams himself your master".
A little personal philosophy to explain my view. I believe the individual and his free will is the highest good. Some restriction of that individual's free will is a necessary evil so that he doesn't restrict the free will of others. That said, all restriction is by definition (granted it's my definition) evil and so the best you can do to maximize the free will of the most people which I believe to be the most moral path.
Hence I think all government and all restriction is by definition an evil (though sometimes necessary to combat a greater quantity of evil). The best government is the least evil one or more accurately the one that maximizes the amount of choice and freewill amongst its citizens. Needless to say despite the fact that I choose to wear seatbelts I still have an issue with forcing everyone to do it, given my personal philosophical choices.
Actually I wear mine 100% of the time because I like living. What I'm saying is that I shouldn't be forced to protect my own life because it might cost someone something. In my opinion it violates the basic concepts of individual free will being more important than the financial health of the collective.
You can probably blame insurance companies for this one. Or whoever has to clean up after an accident.
No probably to it...you can blame insurance companies and lawyers who sue everyone in sight (note I'm not referring to all lawyers). Seat belt laws are about financial risk management nothing more. Just one more example of why the state must protect us from ourselves. Our founding fathers really should have writting "Life, LIberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness as long as the money of the powerful isn't affected.
I agree with everything you said except that DRM can be implemented correctly. The fact that people keep linking you to Pirate Bay is a perfect example of why DRM is so silly. It doesn't stop the pirates and it cripples the legit users.
I'm currently furious about my Kindle download limits (something not advertised and something you can't find out prior to purchasing a book). I totally want to support the content creators but when they treat me like a criminal not only do I not want to support them I don't even want to read their book so I don't bother pirating it. The truly insidious thing about the Kindle problem is they wont' tell you if there is a limit, you just discover it after you buy and try to transfer it to your iPhone or your new Kindle. That to me seems like fraud. I'm sure it isn't legally fraud since Amazon and the publishers can afford lobbyists and I can't but if I were to do something like this to my neighbor it would definitely be considered nasty.
DRM has got to go away, all it does is hurt the guy who wants to buy your product. The pirates just crack it and move on and when your product is badly crippled I can't blame them, they're actually fixing the flawed product you sold them at that point. Companies that use DRM encourage this sort of behavior and it will probably take some of them going out of business and that collapse being linked directly to DRM before it will change.
The download restrictions are very real and IMO near criminal since the device wasn't sold to me as a single download device. In fact it was sold as "amazon will keep copies so you can always access books you own" so imagine my surprise...
I have a book that I bought and downloaded to my Kindle and moved back and forth to the archive storage at amazon then back to the Kindle (due to problems with the original download..I mention this to be complete but I have no idea if this affected the DRM). I then attempted to access it on my iPhone while waiting at the doctor's office to pass the time and was informed that I had exceeded the download limit and if I wanted to continue to read it I would have to purchase it again. Additionally for this book Text-to-Speech is disabled which is a feature I use when I work out.
The book in question is House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street by William D Cohen. It is published by Doubleday. I won't be buying any more of Mr. Cohen's books or those published by Doubleday unless I can confirm that these limits do not exist on future purchases. Additionally despite the fact that the the Kindle is my single favorite gadget I own, this single incident kept me from purchasing the DX (which I wanted for PDF support) due to the fact I knew that the idiotic DRM policies of various publishers would make it impossible for me to seamlessly transfer texts between the two devices and the whole point of owning a Kindle for me is to travel light. Fix it Amazon or you will lose at least one customer.
"We HAVE to support DRM-content only so that we can ensure the quality of the detoxification and protein synthesis functions of iLiver. If you could just put anything in it people would complain about iLiver and it would make us look bad so we must control both the Organware and the Consumptionware for our user's own good."
Unfortunately toxic levels of redbull and tatoo ink ruled out a large percentage of the possible fanboy donors.
I'm going to go with an estimate of about 150 deg F in the back window of my friend's car.
It isn't really all that surprising that an author who was educated in and made his life writing has nostalgic feelings about a place that was instrumental in his life. The fact that he hates the internet is no more surprising and is likely just part of a generational gap. People/Companies who master one system will always resist the next one, especially when the next one does not improve on the old one for the niche part they have mastered. This is just an old master shaking his cane at the young upstarts and being upset that they don't respect what he accomplished and more to the point how he accomplished it and one day the large majority of us will being doing the same thing. Just because you're visionary one day doesn't mean that most don't become the inertial force against the new visionaries the next. It is the rare person that can adapt and shift and remain visionary through more than a few changes.
Commercials aren't about facts...hell most of them aren't even true they just have to be true enough not to constitute outright fraud or slander.
Leave it to /. to make a big deal out of a marketing campaign. It might as well have read, "In other news, the notoriously evil and universally hated company, Microsoft, is now running commercials trying to convince people to buy their products".
There is a common misconception of the programmer as a commodity. Designers are by far the most important resource just as architects and designers are the most important for enterprise apps. That said crappy programmers can destroy a good design just like a bad design can't be coded around. It's akin to designing a sky scraper and getting a bunch of 15th century hut builders to construct it. Designers are imperative but capable programmers are very important as well. The real question is when do you hit a point of diminishing returns for a more expert programmer. To continue the building metaphor you don't need skyscraper builders to build a hut but you'd better not try to build a skyscraper with hut builders.
So I think that's what I said just without the anti-MS venom and allowing for subjective opinions on the subject, but thanks for...um...agreeing?
LOL, I agree that was the point...previous MacOS versions were bad so the new one was considered better, while WinXP to Vista was considered worse.
...um...Friendly Finder) on Mac forums.
BTW, I'm not thrilled with OS X...for example file management user tools on the Mac are horrid. There is a reason you see FTFF (Fix the
Actually that was my point...the Apple OSX upgrade was considered an improvement on the past (i.e. MacOS 9) where as the Windows Vista upgrade wasn't.
Not really my point. My point was that you won't see a switch from Flash to something more standard until the tools are easier that Flash and allow for the same level of design freedom. I just don't like bad designs so I couldn't help but rant on it a bit.
Now to your point about design still sucking. While I take your point and bad design is still bad design your tools influence your design and Flash unfortunately encourages poor usability and breaks basic browser functions due to its embedded nature. Additionally since it focuses entirely on the visual design it often is used by people who know every little about usability and technical design. Additionally it has historically limited integration options and been a pain in the rear for developers attempting to interact with it and a middle tier. So at the most general level you're correct bad design can't be fixed by tool choice but tool choice does influence design and a bad tool can screw up a good design by imposing limitations.
I once heard it called "Flashturbation" and it is completely true. Flash is a plague. Unfortunately it's a plague that is spread because the creative types learned to use Flash early on. Until the creatives are given a tool that is easier or more powerful to use than Flash you'll have to put up with bad interfaces created by people who only care about forcing an experience on the user. The interesting thing to me is that Flash authors have become like the developers of old, completely uninterested in usability because they can't see past their own concerns (technical for devs and visual for creatives).
First, I can't say I agree that Vista isn't worse than XP, I have a macbook pro running 10.5.7, a vista box, and an XP laptop (also I run XP and Ubuntu in a VM on my mac). I use my machines for music recording, fiction writing, and development (both web and otherwise) in Java, .NET, and occasionally other languages. Vista is my least favorite and I keep it around mainly for testing purposes and some media stuff that I"m too lazy to figure out how to do in Linux. It's all pretty subjective but I find it easier to tune XP and get rid of out of the box bloat.
Second, I may not be the typical user but of the windows versions I use regularly, I do like XP better than Vista. That doesn't mean it's objectively better but it does mean that I'm likely to tell people it's better and people who identify with me (tech people who develop and do some creative work on the side) are likely to listen. Additionally your friend identifies with her friends even though they're not "moderate" users and when they tell her they've had issues she will believe them. She's probably right to do so if she's like them and they have problems she'll likely have problems so it makes sense for her to listen to them instead of you despite you having more expertise.
While everyone does hate on MS around here there is one major difference. In general when Apple went to OS X (and with most subsequent upgrades) it was generally viewed as a better system but when MS went to Vista it was viewed as worse. I'm not saying you don't have a point about people hating on MS just to hate but the comparison is a bit apples and oranges.
Just to be clear (I don't want folks to think I'm anti-code review) code reviews do serve an important purpose regarding style consistency, and supportability, they just don't do much good for bug fixing...or at least they are a poor tool for it.
They can also be effective in finding best-practice issues around NFRs such as performance if your shop lacks a disciplined NFR testing approach as many do, though I'd argue that there are better tools and processes for this too and your shop would benefit more from investing in them.